Jamil F. Khan | Art shows us what we can’t see, speaks languages we don’t know we need

In my recent article about the cancellation of South Africa’s official submission for the Venice Biennale by Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture Gayton McKenzie, I interrogated the insidious influence of religious fundamentalism in public office.

The decision to cancel the exhibition by artist Gabrielle Goliath was clearly motivated by the minister’s Zionist Christian beliefs, which he restates his entitlement to at every opportunity, given that the work, Elegy, addressed the atrocities perpetrated in Gaza.

Despite this blow and a further blow from the courts, which dismissed the artist’s appeal to challenge the decision, the work will be exhibited independently at Chiesa de Sant’Antonin, close to where the Biennale will be held.

Though not a part of the official exhibition, the work will most certainly occupy the landscape of the Biennale, speaking clearly and unapologetically as originally intended.

The exhibition has been enabled by a ‘black feminist chorus’ supported by the Centre for Women and Gender Studies at Nelson Mandela University, allowing the work to move forward with ‘friendships and solidarities’ from fellow artists, writers, scholars and activists.

A statement published by this black feminist chorus notes: "In the wake of the censorious cancellation of the work for South African pavilion at the Venice Biennale by McKenzie, after it was independently and unanimously selected, and the judgment against the curatorial team in the High Court – without reason given and with the announcement of Elegy’s independent showing through 'friendship and solidarities' in Venice, these light-filled words of black feminist thinkers and writers resound, collated as note of care and community."

Though accused of being staged as an opportunistic political statement aimed at ruffling feathers, Elegy is an ongoing work that started in 2015. It centres the unattended and neglected duty of mourning in a world where “getting on with it” resounds as a deafening call for us prioritise our participation in capitalism.

As we have seen, the world has “gotten on with it” through successive genocides and crises, both here in a femicide and rape capital of the world and elsewhere from Namibia to occupied Gaza.

More eloquently put by scholars Christina Sharpe and Rinaldon Walcott in a piece for Hyperallergic Magazine titled: “The South African Pavilion Is Betraying Its Own History”.

Goliath’s sound, video, and installation Elegy (2015-ongoing) is a work of witness, collective reverberation, duration, and grief. She has been making iterations of Elegy for over a decade.

It is a necessary work of art and for this moment, a project that helps us to bridge the present with what might come after. Which is to say, Elegy as a poetic intervention for the dead, as well as for those of us left to consider their deaths amid what often feels like an impossibility for action, provides us an opportunity to effectively register how the dead shape the lives of the living. Elegy is not simply a eulogy. It is a communal lamentation.

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When experienced by audiences, this communal lamentation, M Neelika Jayawardane explains, “comprises recordings of seven performances in which different female performers emerge from velvet-dark backgrounds and hold a single, clear, high note for as long as they can.

As each performer begins to lose breath, she steps down from a low podium and exists to her right, and another performer steps up behind her, holding the same note, which ebbs and rises with the tessitura and timbre of her voice.”

Even reading this gives one goosebumps before even confronting the meaning of what is being conveyed. This work, creating an archive of mourning, does the important job of forcing us to stop and face our prolonged state of mourning for lives so easily taken by patriarchal colonial violence, and equally easily moved on from.

Though violence is an unavoidable part of the conversation, Goliath insists that her work is not about violence.

“You will not walk into an exhibition of mine and encounter the depiction of it, as spectacle. In actual fact, it really is about life, particularly for me in a work such as Chorus. It is about a future that is premised on the recall and commemoration of those who have passed, as a way of actively accounting for the conditions of raced and gendered violence that are our norm.”

When considering the affective, embodied, and intellectual forces that drive this work, expressed both by the artist and interlocutors of her work, it becomes even more shamefully egregious that our Minister of Arts and Culture has proven so morally, politically, and intellectually bereft to cancel the delivery of such a deeply profound and urgent message from the best of South Africa’s thinkers.

The thoughts and actions of South African artists have such an important place in the global landscape of thought around histories and futures characterised by gendered and racial violence.

The world needs to hear how we think about these systems, and standing in the way of that is a betrayal of our world-shifting struggles.

Beyond this shameful blight, the defiance of Goliath and the global black feminist chorus that assembled to bring Elegy to Venice during the Biennale has turned an embarrassing failure of political fortitude into a hopeful demonstration of people power – the heart of our most famous rallying cry against systemic injustice: “Amandla!”

We are so much better, smarter, and more responsible than our inept and callous politicians.

They may run the government, but we run this country, and no message that reflects the heart of our demands for freedom and our contemplations on history can be silenced on our watch.

We need art to show us what we can’t see, won’t see. We need artists to speak the languages we did not know we needed. We are the authors of the future of our land, and what we don’t know individually, we learn collectively.

Without the questions and provocations of our artists, we stop dreaming about a better future. While there is only so much each of us can do, with friendships and solidarities, collectively we take back our power, as the friends of Elegy have done.

Dr Jamil F. Khan is an award-winning author, doctoral critical diversity scholar, and research fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study.